Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about writing

377 quotes from 206 people

Most readBy personPage 14 of 26

All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.
Vladimir Lenin1870–1924Collected Works, Vol. 32, pp. 504–9.
- Freedom
- Journalism
Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing1919–2013The Golden Notebook (1962)
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing1919–2013The Guardian, London (7 November 1988)
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme… If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
Doris Lessing1919–2013“Literature Nobel Awarded to Writer Doris Lessing” All Things Considered NPR (11 October 2007)
- Experience
Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
- Art
Don’t say it was ‘delightful’; make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers ‘Please, will you do the job for me?’
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
It is in their ‘good’ characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963A Preface to Paradise Lost
They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963That Hideous Strength (1945), Ch. 13: They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads
- Journalism
The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, p. 90
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
ALA. J. Liebling1904–1963Often credited to H. L. Mencken
- Freedom
- Journalism
Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.
Jack London1876–1916“Getting into Print”, first published in 1903 in The Editor magazine
- Inspiration
There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.
H. P. Lovecraft1890–1937Letter to J. Vernon Shea (August 7, 1931), quoted in “H.P. Lovecraft, a Life” by S.T. Joshi, p. 579
- Life & Death
Don’t avoid the cliches — they are cliches because they work!
George Lucasborn 1944Comment at the Imagineering offices of Disney, on Star Tours simulators (1985), quoted in “The Imagineering Way: Ideas to Ignite your Creativity” (2003) by Marty Sklar
- Advice
A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. He must be an artist indeed who can, in any mode, produce a strict allegory that is not a weariness to the spirit.
George MacDonald1824–1905The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
- Art